When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842, their six-inch sheet showed an egg-shaped depression measuring roughly thirty metres east to west and twenty metres north to south, with what appeared to be a lime kiln sitting at its southern edge. That combination of shapes, particularly the roughly circular hollow, was enough to earn it a listing as a "levelled circular enclosure" in one national record. A decade later, a separate record reclassified it simply as a quarry.

The most likely explanation is straightforward: the depression was dug to extract limestone or other material to feed the kiln beside it. A lime kiln is a simple stone-built structure in which limestone was burned at high temperature to produce quicklime, used widely in Irish agriculture to reduce soil acidity and as a binding agent in mortar. Small-scale quarrying of this kind was common across rural Ireland from at least the eighteenth century, and it was not unusual for a shallow pit to be opened directly beside the kiln it supplied. The misidentification as an enclosure, a category that usually implies prehistoric or early medieval activity, is a reminder of how ambiguous landscape features can appear when only a cartographic outline survives. By the time someone visited the site in 1984, the ground had been levelled entirely; neither the depression nor the kiln left any visible trace on the surface.